On a Token Relations webinar for the XRP ecosystem on Dec. 20, Ripple CTO David Schwartz was asked the sort of question that usually produces a tidy dashboard answer, what on-chain metrics actually matter, what’s “real” economic activity, and what trends are showing up across the ledger (and, yes, the ETF chatter in the background). He went straight to the point: usage that sticks, value that moves, and the boring-but-decisive plumbing that financial institutions actually care about will “take over the world.”
How Ripple Wants To Make The XRPL Mainstream
“I definitely focus on metrics that show sustained usage and real value moving through the network,” Schwartz said. “Transaction activity is probably the clearest signal. The XRP ledger has now processed more than four billion transactions with pretty consistent settlement in about four to five seconds at a fairly predictable fee.”
That’s the pitch in one breath: scale, predictable finality, and fees so low you don’t have to pretend they’re a feature.“You know, a transaction on the XRP ledger costs a tiny fraction of a penny,” the Ripple CTO added. “It’s not trying to extract value from people’s transactions. That’s trying to enable people to do what they need to do.”
Then he pivoted to liquidity, the kind of line XRP holders love to hear, but framed as infrastructure rather than tribal scoreboard-watching. “Liquidity is another huge factor,” Schwartz said. “XRP is a top five digital asset by market capitalization and has been for I think 10 years now, about 109 billion dollars deep global liquidity for real financial activity. That depth matters.”
The bigger point he kept coming back to was momentum in actual network use, not just “we issued a token and it sat there.”
“The XRP ledger itself is now one of the top 10 blockchains for real world activity this year with a rate of increase that’s just absolutely astonishing from a use case that was you know almost unthinkable just a year ago,” he said. “We now have institutional issuers like Guggenheim, Ondo [Finance], Aberdeen [Standard Investments], Franklin [Templeton].”
And then the part that’s meant to separate “RWA theater” from RWAs that matter: “And it’s not just issuance, you know, it wouldn’t be super exciting if they were just sort of issuing an asset on chain that just sort of sat on chain,” the Ripple CTO said. “What’s interesting is that these assets are actually moving and settling on chain. So the financial activity is getting the benefit.”
That little distinction is where a lot of tokenization narratives either hold up or collapse. Anybody can “issue” a thing on a ledger. The harder bit is getting it to behave like financial infrastructure, moving, settling, plugging into workflows that aren’t built for crypto vibes.
Schwartz also threw a bit of cold water on the current retail mix. XRPL has users who love the tech (and users who love leverage), but he was pretty blunt that this isn’t the endgame.
But obviously that’s not how we’re going to take over the world. We’re going to take over the world with solid financial products that solve real world use cases. And we are actually starting to see that now enabled by things like stablecoins and tokenized real world assets that let us handle these use cases like payments and like reasonable investments, tokenized money, market funds and treasuries,” he said. “
And retail might follow the institutions, not the other way around. The Ripple CTO pointed to “more than 500,000 new wallets” created, framing it as early evidence that institutional rails can drag everyday users in behind them.
At press time, XRP traded at $1.88.
